The Very Bad Review

Two Victorian men of letters. One review from hell.

If you were John Keats, and, in the revered Quarterly Review, John Wilson Croker published his opinion that your poetry was “unintelligible,” “diffuse,” “tiresome,” and “absurd,” it would not comfort you much to remember that a bad review can happen to anyone; you would worry that your reputation had been destroyed forever. Three years later, when Lord Byron heard that you had died of consumption in Rome, he would wonder whether your life had been “snuffed out by an Article.” If you were Henry James, and, in January of 1895, your play “Guy Domville” opened and the audience booed, and H. G. Wells—a new reviewer, who, the previous week, had praised Oscar Wilde’s “An Ideal Husband”—predicted for your play “an early deathbed,” you would suffer the “most horrible hours” of your life and resolve to give up the theatre forever. You would never have a popular success, as Wells and Wilde did, and you would have a hard time paying your bills. And if you were Edmund Gosse, a good friend of Henry James, and if, in October of 1886, in the same Quarterly Review, a critic named John Churton Collins pilloried your new book for forty-one of the most scathing pages in the history of reviewing, and the controversy was called by one paper “the scandal of the year,” then you would write to your friend Thomas Hardy that you had been “felled, flayed, eviscerated, pulverized and blown to the winds.” And there would be no solace whatever in the fact that your bad review was so very bad that it was to be considered emblematic for generations.

Collins’s review didn’t just devastate; it revealed. And at the heart of a revealingly bad review is often something like what Edmund Gosse wrote of his relationship with his father: “a struggle between two temperaments, two consciences and almost two epochs.” A writer and his or her critical nemesis are a little like star-crossed lovers; in the end, they’re made not for each other but against each other. The shared accomplishment of Edmund Gosse and John Churton Collins was that the two men found each other, and then that they were so perfectly and irredeemably ill-matched.

In October of 1886, Edmund Gosse had just turned thirty-seven and John Churton Collins was thirty-eight. Gosse—now best known for the still widely read memoir he published in 1907, “Father and Son”—already enjoyed a reputation as one of the major literary critics of his day, a feat of considerable self-invention for someone with no university education. His father, the eminent naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, was a devout member of the Plymouth Brethren, an extreme Calvinist sect, and was so certain that his son was bound for the clergy that he saw no need to send him to university.

John Churton Collins received a solid education at Oxford, and had published highly regarded editions of the works of John Dryden and of the playwright Cyril Tourneur. But in 1885 he had been turned down for a professorship at Oxford, and was struggling to support his wife and seven children by writing reviews and teaching Latin at Mr. Scoones’s, on Garrick Street, a “crammer” where future functionaries were got through their examinations. It was an improvement over his first job, addressing envelopes at two shillings and sixpence per thousand.

This suggests that envy might have played a role in the Quarterly confrontation, and yet in the preceding years the two men had been friendly acquaintances. During the summer of 1878, Collins stayed with Gosse for several pleasant days, and, in subsequent years, Gosse favorably reviewed Collins’s editions of Tourneur and of Dryden. Collins wrote Gosse a number of grateful letters: “I thoroughly believe in your haven, and your genius and your ultimate success—success I mean in the highest sense of the word.” Gosse, not knowing that for Churton Collins idealization was the stage before destruction, was flattered.

At the time of the Quarterly affair, Gosse, who was married and had three children, was the Clark Lecturer at Cambridge University. He had been recommended for the position by Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, and succeeded Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s distinguished father. Gosse—cheerful, perceptive, ingratiating, and witty—was the sort of person everyone wanted at a dinner party. Woolf later wrote that Gosse, at the end of his life, was loath to leave “a world which, with the solitary exception of Churton Collins, had showered upon him so many delightful gifts.” She also said that he could be “as touchy as a housemaid and as suspicious as a governess”; his first biographer, Evan Charteris, described his way of walking as “curiously suggestive at once of eagerness and caution.”

Though happy in his marriage, Gosse also had a long, close relationship with a sculptor, a man with the splendid name of Hamo Thornycroft. (When Lytton Strachey was asked about Gosse’s sexuality, he said that Gosse was “Hamo-sexual.”) It was an era in which double lives were a metaphor for moral quandary—Gosse’s friend Robert Louis Stevenson published “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” in January of 1886, and Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” appeared in 1890—but Gosse wasn’t furtive, though he did become more circumspect after the Wilde trials, refusing to have Wilde’s friend Robert Ross in his home.

Gosse’s scholarship was more sociable than rigorous. He forgot names and dates; he misquoted; in his collections of essays—“Gossip in a Library,” “Aspects and Impressions”—he kept to pleasant surfaces and avoided the depths. T. S. Eliot, writing in The Criterion in 1931, declared, “I cannot conceive of a future society in which Sir Edmund Gosse would be possible,” classifying him among “popular entertainers for whom there will be no demand.” This is a little too cutting. Gosse was among the first to write an appreciation in English of André Gide, he worked hard to try to secure the Nobel Prize for James, and his biographies of Ibsen and Donne gave important recognition to a playwright who was considered too radical and a poet then known only for his sermons.

John Churton Collins—tactless, encyclopedic, high-minded, and industrious—was less easy in the social circles so welcoming to Gosse. “My life, my deeper life,” he wrote, “has been essentially and permanently solitary.” He was, for a time, friendly with the poet Algernon Swinburne, also a friend of Gosse’s; Swinburne was pleased to have Collins’s edition of Tourneur dedicated to him. Churton Collins had been introduced to Browning, too, though, on seeing him again, he noted in his journal, “With Browning I was miserably disappointed . . . his conversation, except when he was speaking of his reminiscences about Carlyle—studiously commonplace”; the poet had, “of course, forgotten me.” Churton Collins was interested in social life mostly as it profited his scholarship. His accounts of dinner parties tended to run along the lines of “[Swinburne] said he thought Prior was a much greater poet than Horace and we fought.” Collins found his company among the poets of previous ages; he felt very close to those who wrote in Latin, and, he said, he “clung to Greek.”

Collins had a talent for invidious distinction and a pained intolerance of the graceful sham; he sifted the evidence of literature as if he were a detective. He was a founding member of the Murder Club, where he and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had a relationship of great mutual respect, and he often wrote about criminal cases for the papers. Collins’s prodigious memory, his knowledge of Latin, and his historical precision made him uniquely well qualified to judge the portraits that Edmund Gosse drew of certain seventeenth-century English poets—Edmund Waller, Sir John Denham, William Davenant, and John Dryden—who had been strongly influenced by the Roman poets. Unfortunately, these figures were at the center of “From Shakespeare to Pope,” Edmund Gosse’s ambitious foray into serious literary scholarship.

In 1884, newly appointed the Clark Lecturer, Gosse hastened off to give a series of lectures in America. He hoped, as he wrote to his friend William Dean Howells, who arranged the tour, that in America he would finally move beyond what he felt to be his current position in England: “hanging by my eyelids to the outer cliff of fame.”

The lectures were terrifically well received, a tribute to Gosse’s appealing style of presentation, given that the material—which chronicled the development of the distich (a strictly rhyming couplet that contains a complete thought)—was not guaranteed to enthrall a general audience. Perhaps his listeners could tell that Gosse didn’t much like those he referred to as “classical” poets, either; he quoted Keats with enthusiasm and approved of the Romantics, who, with their “expression of personal conviction, of personal experience,” were much more to his taste. Most of Gosse’s ramble through the territory of Waller and Davenant had been covered by a succinct paragraph in Churton Collins’s essay on Dryden, which Gosse didn’t mention (though he did find space to remark, pettily, that, ever since Collins’s new edition of Tourneur, people had stopped talking about the playwright altogether). The new darling of the American lecture circuit returned home amid a flurry of congratulations, and gave the lectures again at Cambridge. He wrote a dreadful dedicatory poem to Howells (one of its nine stanzas ran, “You shook it from my wing, / You dived to lift it from my glimmering deeps; / Now, wakened by your voice no more, it sleeps / And grows less mine than yours; here let it cling / And sing”), added a graceful preface, and published the lectures under the slightly misleading title “From Shakespeare to Pope: An Inquiry into the Causes and Phenomena of the Rise of Classical Poetry in England.”

Reviews were generally favorable (“delicate and judicious in its criticism, brilliant in its illustration, easy and pointed in its style,” one said), and Cambridge was pleased. John Churton Collins thought the reception given Gosse a disgusting example of logrolling, and he thought Gosse’s book the latest iniquity in the catalogue of crimes against literary scholarship and pedagogy then being perpetrated by the British university.

Churton Collins was active in the University Extension Movement, which was attempting to make education more widely available, and he believed that English universities were failing to recognize the strengths of English literature—endowing chairs in Anglo-Saxon but none for scholars of Shakespeare or Milton, and teaching “Macbeth” only as an exercise in Elizabethan grammar. He envisaged a field of literary scholarship that would be both exacting and vital, and he felt this could be achieved by integrating the study of English literature with that of the classics: “The literature of antiquity was to Milton’s genius what soil and light are to a plant.” To him, the philology then dominating the academy was to the true study of literature what anatomy is to psychology: “The scalpel, which lays bare every nerve and every artery in the mechanism of the body, reveals nothing further.” On the other hand, he found the sloppiness of Gosse’s casual belletrism almost morally abhorrent. And he was afraid that any decent scholar who looked into “From Shakespeare to Pope” would immediately conclude that popular education at a high standard was impossible. Churton Collins didn’t want to miss a moment that he felt to be propitious for reform.

For four months, Collins worked, as was his habit, until two or three in the morning; Gosse’s book was the occasion to define a program, alluded to in the review’s title, for “English Literature in the Universities.” The review opened with a sentence that has since been widely quoted: “That such a book as this should have been permitted to go forth to the world with the imprimatur of the University of Cambridge, affords matter for very grave reflection.”

Fourteen pages of Collins’s review were concerned with the more egregious of Gosse’s factual errors. Gosse claimed that the first English poet to write in distichs was the hero of his small volume, Edmund Waller, who is now known mostly for his lyrics “Go, Lovely Rose” and “On a Girdle,” and who had, with Gossean facility, written panegyrics to both Oliver Cromwell and the restored King Charles. Waller, Collins pointed out, had most certainly not arrived first in the land of the distich (“No more absurd statement was ever made”); surely Mr. Gosse was aware of the heroic couplets written more than sixty years earlier by Nicholas Grimald, and those of Robert Greene and Joseph Hall, which predated Waller’s “discovery” by nearly thirty years. To support his assertion, Gosse cited Waller’s “To the King, on His Navy,” repeatedly dating the poem to 1621; Collins noted that if Gosse had troubled to look at it, he would have found the correct date, 1626, “given under the title.” The reviewer thought particularly galling the author’s habit of depicting poets and politicians in a manner at once so vivid and so remote from their actual careers. The playwright James Shirley, for example, did not spend his time in exile going to “balls, comedies, and promenades”; rather, he was engaged, as Collins put it, in the “honourable drudgery” of teaching.

Collins was almost willing to forgive Gosse for not knowing whether “the Arcadia of Sidney and the Oceana of Harrington are in prose or verse,” and even for not having bothered to look them up, “but that he should, under the impression that they are poems, have had the effrontery to sit in judgement on them, might well . . . make us ashamed of our species.” Worse still, Gosse seemed to have been deliberately deceptive. He had detailed the diligent research with original documents that had allowed him to find a new and more accurate date of death for Sir John Denham; Churton Collins pointed out that the correct date was given in most of the major reference volumes and was the date under which Denham’s burial is “in the register at the Abbey.”

Drawing a breath, Collins wrote, “We have by no means exhausted the list of Mr. Gosse’s blunders, but we have, we fear, exhausted the patience of our readers.” He moved on to interpretation: it seemed odd to compare a poem of Davenant’s to a huge dead tree and at the bottom of the same page to praise it for its “gorgeous and exotic imagery.” And as for the style: “Was there no one who could save Mr. Gosse from making himself ridiculous by such eloquence as this: ‘We who can see this Orpheus-like Charles torn to pieces by the outraged liberties of England, and that comely head floating down the Hebrus of the Revolution’?” In sum: “A book so unworthy . . . of a great University has never before been given to the world.”

Gosse was humiliated. With his friends he did his best to be brave, writing in a letter to Howells, “I think that so long as one is not absolutely crushed out of competition, a blow of this kind is very useful,” though he painfully felt “the sting of it at present; it is like being struck a blow in the face, and then tickled with nettles over the spot.” His friends helped all they could: Matthew Arnold weighed in; Thomas Hardy and Robert Louis Stevenson sent supportive letters. Alfred Lord Tennyson was famously supposed to have declared the reviewer “a louse on the locks of literature,” though it was Gosse who had circulated both the gibe and the attribution. (Tennyson had, less memorably, called Collins “a jackass.”) Gosse himself wrote a public letter with a meagre defense of his scholarship and a few paragraphs explaining how hurtful had been this betrayal of friendship by “my Quarterly Reviewer.”

Collins handled the matter with his customary maladroitness. He wrote that he thought Gosse was being very thin-skinned; after all, when, the previous year, he had said equally critical things about Swinburne in the Quarterly Review, he had heard nothing at all from the poet. As it happened, Swinburne hadn’t known of that attack until alerted by Collins’s letter. Now he came storming into the brawl (“May the God of letters preserve me from the deep disgrace of deserving his commendation!”), and Collins lost his admired friend and closest literary ally.

Cambridge stood behind its Clark Lecturer, although none of Gosse’s colleagues seem to have thought the book particularly distinguished, or the review particularly wrong. Henry James wrote to William Dean Howells that Gosse had “paid, fearfully, the penalty” of his “false position” at Cambridge, and later said that Gosse had “a genius for inaccuracy.” At Oxford, when a scholar made an error people took to saying, “He has made a Gosse of himself.” Still, the consensus was that Collins’s review was not nice. The way in which the literary world rallied behind Gosse has sometimes been taken to show that his offenses were not very serious. As Janet Malcolm has pointed out, Gosse’s habitual inaccuracy can too easily be regarded as a sort of condition, “like nearsightedness”; she suggests, convincingly, that physiology is not nearly so helpful here as psychology. For underneath the literary quarrel was an “expression,” as Gosse said of his favorite poets, “of personal experience.”

Edmund Gosse and his biographers all tell the story that when he was born his father noted in his diary, “E. delivered of a son. Received green swallow from Jamaica.” This is often interpreted as a sign of Philip Henry Gosse’s rigidity and coldness. But Ann Thwaite, the biographer of both Gosses, has added to the picture; the naturalist—widely esteemed for his “History of the British Sea-Anemones and Corals”—was frequently engaging and cheerful, took pleasure in his specimens, loved his wife, Emily, and was very fond of his son, whom the family always thought of as a most appealing little bird. The Gosses were certain that their songbird had a spiritual gift and gave themselves completely to his religious education.

Edmund wondered if his mother might have been “intended by nature to be a novelist,” but she had been convinced as an adolescent that fiction was the Devil’s work and grew up to write religious tracts, for which she was very well known in her lifetime. She deprived herself and her son of the pleasure of stories. Gosse, in an often quoted passage of “Father and Son,” writes of discovering, on a newspaper lining a box in the attic, some fragments of a thrilling serial, and of how he read them “kneeling on the bare floor, with indescribable rapture.” Having no previous experience of fiction, he believed every word.

Perhaps Edmund was also meant to be a novelist; certainly his family story was the right material for him. Gosse had a gift for reminding the reader of the strange distortions one feels as a child. He rose to the most difficult occasions not so much by remembering them accurately as by conveying them with emotional force. Describing his mother’s final illness, when he was seven, he says, “I felt, as I stood, awkwardly and shyly, by her high bed, that I had shrunken into a very small and insignificant figure, that she was floating out of my reach, that all things, but I knew not what nor how, were coming to an end.”

The defining loss of John Churton Collins’s life was the death of his father. When John was nine years old, Henry Ramsay Collins signed on, for vague reasons of ill health, to be a ship’s doctor on a vessel bound for Australia and, in the harbor in Melbourne, fell off a pier, broke his leg, went into the hospital, was given a diagnosis of consumption, and died. Much grieved, John, his two younger brothers, and their mother drew close to one another; for financial support, they relied upon her brother. At school, John was held in high regard for the wonderful adventure stories he told. Once, the other boys were so appreciative that they got together to give him some money for books—he bought, among other things, the poems of Edward Waller. Churton Collins reported this moment of approbation to his mother with pleasure and some surprise; it seems that he rather expected to be overlooked.

At Oxford, he was a more confident figure: he wore a velveteen jacket, was never seen without his deerhound Prince, and reminded his classmate Andrew Lang of the charming and attractive Will Ladislaw, from George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” then being published in installments. He still turned to his uncle for support and guidance, but, in being careless with funds, not getting a first at Oxford, and choosing criticism over the clergy, he proved such a disappointment that his uncle declined ever to see him again. This was particularly painful as the uncle had been quite proud of his clever nephew; the family always talked about John’s immaculate botany collection and loved to tell the story of how he had once recited two thousand lines of Virgil from memory—a cousin checking his recitation against the original—and hesitated over only two words.

These were virtues that Philip Gosse would have prized. He used to send Edmund out for walks and demand a list of observations on his return. Edmund loved collecting specimens in the tidal pools of the Devonshire coast with his father, and some of the most vivid descriptions he wrote as an adult were of a world that had long since been destroyed: “No one will see again the submarine vision of dark rocks, speckled and starred with an infinite variety of colour, and streamed over by silken flags of royal crimson and purple.” When Philip Gosse was away lecturing, his son sent him endearing letters, tossing off the scientific names of specimens they kept in glass tanks. (Philip Gosse is credited with inventing the marine aquarium.) “The Idotea is dead in the large tank and we think 1 astrina gibbeossa to. My catterpiller has changed its skin, it looks beautiful, it has changed the colour of its toes from black to pink.” Edmund Gosse had discovered not only a new species but a new genus—Phellia murocincta, the walled corklet—before he was ten.

Though the Plymouth Brethren were fervently committed to adult baptism, the naturalist, treating his child as something like a specimen—“to pin me down, as it were, beyond any possibility of escape,” Gosse later wrote—insisted that the boy be baptized at the age of ten. Instead of binding him to religion, as his father had hoped, it gave Gosse his first taste of public acclaim. When, at seventeen, he gave up his faith in favor of the seductions of the London literary world, he fully expected a complete break with his father, but no punishment ever came.

The world was less forgiving of Philip Gosse, who struggled to square his religious devotion and his insistent empiricism. As Edmund wrote of his father, “Every instinct in his intelligence went out at first to greet the new light” of evolutionary theory, but his strictly literal interpretation of doctrine held him back. From this dilemma came “Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot,” in which Philip Gosse asserted that God had made even the fossil record during the six days of creation. He fully believed that “Omphalos” was his real contribution to science, and, after its publication, when the great naturalists of his acquaintance—Huxley, Wallace, Kingsley, and Darwin himself—remained silent, or respectfully explained that they could not in the least agree, “a gloom, cold and dismal, descended upon our morning teacups.”

In “From Shakespeare to Pope,” Gosse argued that the development of literature should be traced not only by “contemplation of the best” but also by studying the lesser writers who were part of “the spectacle of motion, of evolution.” With the lesson of his father’s failure in mind, he tried to consider poetry through something like a framework of natural selection. Gosse hoped that “From Shakespeare to Pope” was his contribution to a theory of literary history; Churton Collins knew it was his “Omphalos.” Gosse asked, “Why was it not John Milton instead of Edmund Waller to whom it was given to revolutionize poetry in English literature?,” and, as if examining geological strata, he answered, “Broadly speaking, it was because Milton was born three years later than Waller.” Churton Collins thought this was “amazing nonsense”—in no true understanding of literature could you say that “Go, Lovely Rose” had the influence of “Paradise Lost.” But then these two temperaments were always irreconcilable: John Churton Collins was looking for an ideal and Edmund Gosse was looking to get out from under one.

Very bad reviews are not, in the final accounting, a good index of their recipients’ later success. After Croker published his terrible review, Keats had one of the most productive years of his life. Henry James set aside his play, returned to novels, and went on to write “The Ambassadors,” “The Wings of the Dove,” and “The Golden Bowl.” Edmund Gosse, too, fared well. Choosing not to stand for reëlection at Cambridge, he left there without disgrace in 1889. The year before, his father had died. Edmund claimed that Philip Gosse, in terrible pain, had, at the last, been enraged with God, though this may have been his usual enhancement of the story, as others reported a more peaceful death. Still, the younger Gosse had felt what Henry James in his letter of condolence called “the removal of so unmitigable a presence,” and in some way this freed him. Years after the Quarterly review, Gosse made his most resonant portraits in “Father and Son”; William Dean Howells expressed the general opinion when he wrote that “in all the autobiographic books I have read, I remember nothing equalling it.” Beginning in 1919, Gosse had a regular column in the Sunday Times, through which he wielded enormous influence. He was given an honorary degree from Cambridge in 1920, was knighted in 1925, and after one round of celebrations genially complained that he was being “stifled in roses.”

Just over a decade after “the scandal of the year,” Gosse wrote “A Short History of Modern English Literature.” With the spectre of Churton Collins in mind, he sent frantic letters to his publisher with corrections. Churton Collins did get hold of the book and did savage Gosse again, using the same strategy and criticisms and even the same turns of phrase, but the forgetfulness that made Gosse vulnerable to attack also spared him from lasting injury. This time, Gosse and his friends paid scant attention; the “Short History,” though error-ridden, became a standard text and went through ten printings.

“The secret of success in life is known only by those who have not succeeded,” Collins once wrote with mordant self-knowledge. He applied for a chair of English literature at Oxford in 1904, and though the twenty-seven referees thought his the best application, he was turned down. He did gain an appointment at Birmingham University, but he remained isolated from the community of scholars so dear to him, and his extraordinary memory—for dates and distichs, abandonments and betrayals—may have worsened a tendency toward melancholy. In 1908, the year after “Father and Son” was published to wide acclaim, John Churton Collins was found drowned in a ditch near Lowestoft, possibly a suicide.

In the end, the Quarterly affair left the pattern of the two men’s lives intact. When the denizens of Cambridge and the House of Lords and the subscribers to the Sunday Times decided whom to read and whom to honor, Edmund Gosse they remembered, and John Churton Collins they forgot. ♦